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What comes to mind when you think of Munich? Longchamp and Rimowa!! And well, for me it’s the Marienplatz clock tower. This grandeur never fails to give me the chills! My goal next year is to photograph the Rathaus Glockenspiel in Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter. So far, I’ve only done Summer and Autumn.

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Fun fact: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart lived around the block from the Hofbrauhaus in the late eighteenth century. Mozart revealed in a poem to have written the opera Idomeneo after several visits to the beer hall.

The place for beer lovers

For the love of meat

And the famous German pork knuckles

Digging in!

Basically a pint of beer is all it takes to be friends at the Hofbrauhaus

Heading back into the town center of Marienplatz is easy when you’ve got a Captain who’s very familiar with the topography.

This fountain reminds me too much of Singapore’s USS!

Having my mandatory gelato…after a long walk at Dachau. An immensely refreshing treat for the summer. Am definitely coming back for my winter gelato brainfreeze.
Have I ever mentioned that Nuts and Baileys is my new favourite gelato flavour?

Also bought myself fresh raspberries and strawberries for supper!

As with all European cities, I find their architecture very fascinating.

This is the Rathaus-Glockenspiel in the heart of Marienplatz.

Every day without fail at 11 a.m. (12 p.m. and 5 p.m. in summer) it chimes and re-enacts stories from the 16th century to crowds of tourists and locals.

Each story lasts 12-15 minutes, and at least 500 people were gathered in the square to watch the spectacle with us.

Munichers are famous for PORK KNUCKLES and really, it’s truly a mouthwatering treat 🙂
The more famous pork-knuckle makers in town

Was accumulating photographs along the way, and I’m really surprised I managed to snap so many…

Have no idea why the Caucasian men in this one became the main focus. Naughty camera.

This pretty much sums up our afternoon, lazy walks in the Munich summer heat, mindlessly appreciating the amazing architecture in the city.

Here we are at the gate, where 60,000 Jews entered but never left.
(admittedly, we look a tad too happy for the solemnity, but it’s a tourist thing)

To be honest it could be a lovely walk in the park if not for the bloody/bloodless (depending on how you look at it) massacre behind its historical existence.

Learning about World War II and Nazi’s brutal killing of the Jews from history textbooks never actually hit home, until stepping personally into the place where actual events unfolded. Certain images on the info-boards were truly shocking.

If you’d care to read it, I’ve taken down most of the facts and images.

Dachau is HUGE, but for 64,000 prisoners? How could this be enough?

We walked in a loop, first into the administrative buildings of the Nazis’, then the prisoner bunks and fields where they slogged and toiled their lives away, then to the furnace where they disappeared from this earth.

Administrative windows where the prison guards looked upon their slaves

Walls of the administrative buildings, now decorated with historical timelines

Looking out through the same bars everyday

Jewish Prisoners

Heartbreaking things

Artifacts

The actual uniforms

A whole new level of spanking

Nazi conquered…

The death toll against the war progression

The Layout of Dachau camp

An erected memorial in commemoration of the suffering
(again, the tourist pose is in no disrespect)

Back outdoors after the insightful indoors tour and a short clip of the horror involving bodies, a shocking documentary, footage of Hitler’s declarations, and more bodies in differing stages of death.

Never again, but do people actually learn?

Again, am amazed by the vast spaces.

Interestingly, their bunk beds are amazingly clean. Perhaps these people never slept. Or they were sleeping wide awake.

Spaces where more buildings used to be but were torn down to hide gruesome facts of the massacre

Latrines

Newly erected Church in the ’70s by the courtyard

Quiet sanctuary to remember the dead

We walked deeper into the camp site, and were met with the sign that said Crematorium

Place where bodies were disposed of and incinerated by the thousands

In this room, they were first isolated and kept, awaiting death by poison gases.

The actual incineration of the dead

Cold chamber where the un-incinerated bodies were piled up and kept

Way out into the disinfection chambers

There was another crematorium in the building right next to

This one is extremely dusty. Some of the air you breathe in might even contain traces of the dead (okay I sound too creepy now)

We then took the long arduous walk back from the crematorium to the open gates – a long long walk that made us lament how we felt almost like the prisoners themselves, except that they probably never made it home like we did.

T’was a long post, and such was the long afternoon we spent learning about mistakes that should never be repeated.
Seriously, if only people would lose the idea that any group of people could ever dominate another – physically and/or ideologically.
I’m not displaying the class act of Miss Universes by wishing for world peace, but I do hope catastrophically stupid people could drop their psychotic ideologies and just let the rest of us live in peace.
Cliche as this sounds, the world would be a better place.